Imagine Communications to Demonstrate TabletTV Streaming at IBC

New ICE Streaming System Platform Offers the Industry’s Most Scalable and Efficient IPTV and Multi-Screen, Multi-Format Video Delivery Platform

SAN DIEGO, CA — Imagine Communications, a leading innovator in advanced digital video solutions, today announced plans to demonstrate solutions for TabletTV streaming at next week’s IBC 2011 in Amsterdam, Sept 9-13. In Imagine’s booth #3.A15j (Hall 3), the company will showcase its latest innovation, the ICE® Streaming System, for streaming live multi-format video to multiple tablets. IBC is the leading global tradeshow for professionals engaged in the creation, management and delivery of broadcasting media and entertainment.

The global market for multi-format video transcoders is predicted to reach revenue of more than $460 million in 2015 (In-Stat). The bullish nature of this market is largely contributed to the growing need to expand mobile networks and Internet content. In-Stat also recently reported that about 50 percent of consumers with the popular tablet mini-computers are streaming movies as well as TV shows. Operators sending more and more video content via their IP networks and over the Internet need better video transcoding products to stay ahead of their rivals.

“In today’s multi-screen TV Anywhere world, service providers need a better solution for multi-format transcoding — one that can support on-the-fly premium de-interlacing and multi-profile processing and deliver HD-image quality and bandwidth efficiency — all at an affordable cost that scales up to hundreds or thousands of multi-profile streams,” said Imagine’s VP of Product Marketing Chris Gordon. “To deliver on the promise of premium video quality to all devices, advanced functions such as pixel-accurate processing and de-interlacing must move to the network-side transcoding platform.”

Imagine’s ICE Streaming System is a new network-side transcoding video processing platform that allows multi-screen service providers to deliver uncompromised video quality across multiple devices, with unmatched compression efficiency. A fully integrated, high-density solution, the ICE Streaming System boasts support for up to 1000 stream-aligned, multi-profile transcodes from a single carrier-class blade system platform. The ICE Streaming System is based on Imagine’s widely deployed ICE Video Platform, which today serves thousands of live streams to over half of all North American digital cable subscribers and is recognized as the industry’s most powerful multi-codec, multi-rate, multi-resolution video processing platform.

The ICE System is a powerful new video processing platform that combines leading picture quality and unlimited scalability with full support for integrated fragmentation, encryption and HTTP streaming, allowing TV Everywhere service providers to deploy multi-screen services on the same high availability platforms used to deliver industry-leading HD (high definition) and SD (standard definition) broadcast transcoding. The distributed architecture enables an unlimited number of output profiles for any source stream with guaranteed alignment. A key differentiator of the ICE Video Platform’s hybrid architecture for TabletTV is Motion Adaptive Pixel Accurate (MAPA) de-interlacing technology, guaranteeing the highest picture quality for live video to the tablet’s progressive screen.